20 bodies dumped in Tampico streets

By Dudley Althaus - Houston Chronicle

Published 6:36 pm, Friday, June 11, 2010

MEXICO CITY — With most residents inside watching their national team's World Cup match with South Africa, killers Friday morning dumped the tortured bodies of 20 victims on residential streets near the Mexican Gulf Coast city of Tampico.

Troops recovered the bodies of 18 men and two women in four locations in Ciudad Madero, a working-class city adjacent to Tampico. Some of the victims were handcuffed and all had been shot with heavy-caliber weapons, police said.

The killings come amid open warfare between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, formerly allied criminal gangs now vying for control of the state of Tamaulipas, which borders South Texas. Dozens of people, including police officers and troops, have been killed in gangland violence in recent months in Tamaulipas and neighboring Nuevo León state.

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“These are the only deaths so far today. Fingers crossed,” Ruben Dario Rios, a spokesman for the state attorney general's office said of Friday's killings.

But violence flared elsewhere in Mexico all this week.

Shortly before midnight Thursday, as many as 25 gunmen executed 19 men and wounded four at a drug rehabilitation center in Chihuahua City, capital of the state bordering West Texas. The victims, all reportedly addicts being treated by the clinic, were forced to lie face down in a clinic hallway and then shot, witnesses told local media.

More than 60 people have been killed in similar attacks in Chihuahua in the past year, most of them in Ciudad Juárez, a city bordering El Paso that has become Mexico's most violent. Authorities said rival drug gangs use the rehab centers as cover, making them easy targets for rivals.

President Felipe Calderón, in Johannesburg for the opening World Cup match, said the Chihuahua killings “reinforce the conviction of the need to fight criminal gangs who carry out such barbaric acts.”

Police early this week pulled 55 decomposed bodies from an abandoned mine outside Taxco, a colonial-era tourist haven south of Mexico City. Officials said the victims probably were killed in the ongoing struggle for control of that area by former gangland allies.

More than 23,000 people have been killed in little more than three years since Calderón dispatched Mexico's military to take on the increasingly powerful criminal gangs, which have grown wealthy smuggling illegal drugs to U.S. and Mexican consumers.

The bloodletting has been largely between rival gangsters, with troops and police sometimes taking on the gangs. Most of the victims have been linked to either the gangs or security forces. But scores of innocent civilians have been killed as well.